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The dynamical evolution of young clusters and galactic implications

Pavel Kroupa

astro-pharXiv:astro-ph/0605072

Abstract

Star clusters are observed to form in a highly compact state and with low star-formation efficiencies. If the residual gas is expelled on a dynamical time the clusters disrupt thereby (i) feeding a hot kinematical stellar component into their host-galaxy's field population, and (ii) if the gas-evacuation time-scale depends on cluster mass, then a power-law embedded-cluster mass function transforms within ten to a few dozen Myr to a mass function with a turnover near 105 Msun, thereby possibly explaining this universal empirical feature.

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